


Come Again

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [44]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bad Decisions, F/M, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:56:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5482430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sees him, occasionally. Post-"Hell Bent"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Again

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who requested: Clara is brought back to life (natch). She's set up with a new life in America to keep her safe from TimeLord revenge and dickishness now that Gallifrey is back. 12 visits her to say farewell and she decides she'd like to get pregnant for her new life. "Fuck it, let's get pregnant" shag ensues.

They’re both time travelers. She should have known this would happen. It’s a small universe, when you’re trying to avoid someone.

And Clara is doing her damnedest to avoid the Doctor. This means no Earth, none of the Sol planets. This means a program Ashildr wrote that tracks Doctor-shaped disturbances, rates social upheavals and temporal weakpoints and festivals and anything with a big flashing come-here sign. For his sake, for her sake, for the whole universe’s sake, they can’t meet.

After they realize how impossible it is to find six spare inches of space that the Doctor isn’t in and won’t ever go, when she’s spun the TARDIS into a tailspin in the vortex and she practices breathing exercises to keep the frustration and the ache and the existential panic of her non-life in check. When she’s reeling off safe activities and safe places and _I guess we just go where it’s so boring that he’d never bother._ Ashildr puts a hand on Clara’s lower back and looks up with that unfathomably old, sad smile, and suggests they relax the parameters a bit. Only specific Doctors off-limits. Keep to themselves and don’t make waves, and the timeline will forgive them their intrusion.

The timeline is fucked by their existence enough as it is. One or two minor paradoxes won’t make a dent.

So she sees him, occasionally. From a distance, usually, and usually he’s got some scheme she does her best to stay out of, although sometimes she can’t resist playing at least a supporting role. Sometimes they talk, she’s got fake names lined up, she calls herself Caroline or Karla or Susie or whatever, even if despite herself she wishes that, against all odds and logic, he’d recognize her.

Once she meets him in a bar on Brevlox IV. He’s blonde and blue all over, ribbon tie, spats, drinking apple juice. A mix of too loud and too delicate, something mournful under his bluster, and she can’t resist the impulse to take his hand. They share a moment.

_Do we meet?_ he asks, staring into her eyes, searching for she doesn’t know what. _I’d like to meet you, I think._

She squeezes his hand and she smiles and shakes her head and then she leaves. She leaves, she runs, she slams the TARDIS door behind her and she puts a billion miles, a thousand years between the two of them. Hands shaking on the buttons, levers, all of time and space under her fingertips and she only wants one thing. Ashildr is giving her that look again.

They relax the parameters - whatever, she can do this, she can do anything she wants. If she’s very clever, she can pull this off. Ashildr figures out how to make the coffee maker produce Retcon. They keep a vial of it on them at all times. Better safe than sorry. (Safest would be to not need it at all, but where’s the fun in that?)

She sees him, chin-and-bowtie him, across a crowded street. She sees herself. She pretends to be herself, sometimes. Little things. Oh, she’s just Clara from two weeks in the future, this will all be hilarious when you can tell yourself the story. She grins and she waves and she tut-tuts when he asks her questions. And she runs away, leaving him and the person she’d been behind.

She wonders if there was ever a point where he remembered these moments and figured out that they’d never added up. She wonders if there had even been time. It had happened so quickly, but then, Time Lords think differently than humans. Maybe he’d lived a month in a minute and maybe he’d put it together and maybe he’d known what would happen when they pressed the button. It’s an awful, floor-dropped-out thought.

And Ashildr is giving her that look again.

They loosen the rules. Lose the rules. Fuck rules, anyway. An immortal and a zombie, they’ve already broken so many of those vaunted Laws of Time. What’s one more.

So she meets him. Him-him. She might have even done it on purpose, gone a place she remembers him telling her he’d gone to pass the time while she finished out the term at work. And she remembers never quite having believed him when he’d said he’d just hung out, made friends, fixed the palace’s interior decoration.

The floor dropping out from under her when he sees her. Says her name. Pulls her into a tight hug, says some dumb joke, looks at her suspiciously when she draws back. He knows she’s not right. Can he feel it? Her lack of a pulse, her wrongness, how misaligned she is with everything. He’s a very clever man. He’s also a very dumb man, and this is what she counts on when she kisses him, lets him lead her to the hotel bedroom he hadn’t been sleeping in, but instead creating a Rube Goldberg toast machine.

This is risky, this is more than risky, this is stupid and potentially catastrophic. She does it anyway. She locks the door, undresses, undresses him. She pushes him down to the mattress and it’s so familiar, such a comfortable, practiced move, and it knocks the air out of her chest. Does he notice? Had he been lying when he’d said he couldn’t pick apart her emotions, couldn’t figure out that mix of happy and sad? And can he tell that her body is lying, that her heartbeat is an approximation? Can he taste the nanotech, the ghost of it on her skin as she sweats?

It should matter, but it doesn’t. She fucks him - God, those noises he makes, how could she have ever forgotten those - and she cries a little bit and when he comes inside her, time goes slack in her head and she thinks, oh. She could carry his child. This could be that, right now, she could grab a piece of him and carry it with her and then raise their sprog and what if, what if -

She leaves him asleep, with a note tucked into his pocket. Debates leaving the Retcon, but doesn’t - he’s forgotten enough about her, she can’t bear the thought of him forgetting more. She runs back to her TARDIS, and runs a scan on herself, and takes a dozen different contraceptive drugs and half-collapses onto the console, the plastic cold and hard and buzzing against her. Ashildr isn’t giving her the look, instead something kind and understanding, and for whatever reason that’s worse.

She can’t ever do that again, she knows that much. Like peas in a pod, they are, even now: one or the other of them will go too far. It had been her turn. Last turn. You can’t ever go home again, and she knows that, she does. She will remember that. She has to.

They tighten up the parameters, and find one of the very few alien invasions on Earth that the Doctor hadn’t been involved with. They save the day, they have fun. This is what she should be doing, running around 1930s Chicago shooting tommy guns at giant ant-things. Ashildr grabs her hand and yanks hard and yells _run_ , and she does. They do.

And if she sees him, across the street, long brown hair and frock coat, getting his picture taken with a scruffy young man. If she recognizes him, the essential core of him, part of what she’d fallen in love with so long ago. It’s fine. She smiles, and shakes her head, and moves on. That’s not her story, it’s not her place. He’ll go forth in the world and she will too, and they’ll - well. She’ll tighten the parameters. No sense dwelling on the past, after all.


End file.
